Stupid: "... solar panels ...millions of pounds of polluted

I know that my employer treated water pumped out of the ground to beyond drinking water standards before using it in cattle feed. (alfalfa irrigation) The EPA fined us for dumping industrial waste water as there was no provision in the law for a company to actually treat 'wastewater' back to drinking water standards. (They have a 3000 foot deep pit they would like to keep dry, so they pumped water out of the surrounding ground, it was only wastewater because they moved it)

I would want to see how treated the water shipped by the solar firms was before I suspected it of being actually hazardous. The law never quits thinking it is hazardous, ever.

 

It would surprise me if no life cycle assessment of PV considered disposal of 'production' chemicals. But, I have not read them

 

Maybe we should also read this

Arthur Berman, Shale Is Magical Thinking - Business Insider

from the same journal? I do not know. Pierrehumbert wrote something similar recently, maybe that was in Slate.

I am in no position to decide whether tight oil 'Hubberts' quickly, but they both seem to say so.

 

. . . . meanwhile, the San Onofre nuke powered electric generating plant (just 25ish miles from us) has been stockpiling their spent fuel rods on sight (just like many nuke facilities do) ever since they opened. Although the facility can take a huge hit (tidal wave or earth quate) ... the spent rod containers have no such protection. Compare that to the water rules described above ... that's called straining the fleas out before you eat the elephant.

 

San Onofre has been offline for what...a year? What's the prognosis on that?

I've never seen a review of which fuel-rod pools are at the highest risk of natural disasters, but Hill's idea points us in that direction. And he might have a contender.

 

This is why so many get fed up with the EPA. The regulations are huge and hard to read and often counter productive. We need reform, but..... A great case in point of not proper regulation is the Texas city BP refinery. They actually killed people through skirting good procedures but fine were so small they kept polluting well past any legal or ethical limits. Finally bad PR for BP finally got them to sell the refinery to Marathon. I have not heard of large releases of hazardous chemicals since the new ownership.

I'm sure that the water was hazardous before it was shipped, but so what? It was shipped to treatment plants then treated. In these times when California solar firms are asking for tarrif protection as well as more government money, an honest accounting should come up. I don't think it is so bad if these things are made in china and sold to us below cost, versus paying more in taxes to prop up industry in California then paying more for solar.

 

Calif grid planning for 2nd summer without San Onofre output| Reuters
Late April or May at the earliest for 70% on one reactor for 5 months.

We also have congress involved, it was perhaps known that there was a high probability of failure
San Onofre's problematic generators - Los Angeles Times

What is daunting is the California PUC has not built new natural gas to fill in as this plant will be operating at 35% capacity or less this summer, and may never turn back on. The missing power will again be imported from out of state keeping electricity bills high and increasing risks of black outs.

 

Did anybody actually read all of that article?

"The roughly 20-year life of a solar panel still makes it some of the cleanest energy technology currently available. Producing solar is still significantly cleaner than fossil fuels. Energy derived from natural gas and coal-fired power plants, for example, creates more than 10 times more hazardous waste than the same energy created by a solar panel, according to Mulvaney.'

"After installing a solar panel, "it would take one to three months of generating electricity to pay off the energy invested in driving those hazardous waste emissions out of state," said Dustin Mulvaney, a San Jose State University environmental studies professor who conducts carbon footprint analyses of solar, biofuel and natural gas production."

Spin aside, what the article says is, solar is the cleanest technology, solar companies transport their waste for treatment, and that adds something like a couple of months to the energy payback period.

All the rest is spin. E.g., they told you how many pounds of stuff, over a long period of time, but not in relation to the output of solar panels over the same period. The reader can't tell whether that's 100x the weight of the solar cells created, or 0.001% of the weight of the solar panels created. It's a classic "isolated figure", from How to Lie With Statistics. You can read the article and you have absolutely no idea whether (e.g. ) solar cells are any cleaner or dirtier than any other type of electronics manufacture.

 

Somehow he gets his own magical thinking involved. The contention is because shale oil is more expensive than conventional that we will quickly stop investing in it as the cost increases, but consumption will not decrease. That would mean demand stays flat as supply drops but price stays stable. There is some basic economics missing from this analysis. Over the long term if price increases, so does investment - meaning more north American supply. If price increases demand will drop in the long term meaning less north American consumption. There we get to less North American imports of oil. Canada and mexico need to be included in the equation though, not just the US.

 

I read it. I started with the crazy thought that it might be some investigative reporting of Chinese solar panel manufacturing having missing environmental oversight. (Still uneducated about that however). The shocking lesson was how well US manufacturers comply with US regulations.

His next shocker should be about the huge raging torrent of ugly mucky sewage that the local water treatment centers dumps into the environment (after treatment). It amounts to 100's of millions of gallons a day.

 

...and that's why I brought up (for example) the major fail of nuke electricity. Some will nit pick the down side of solar waste - (or teeny bits of mercury used in wind/electric production) while spent nuke fuel stock piles? Maybe I'm halucinating, but why not deal with the huge elephant(s) in the room ... like spent nuke fuel, and or mountains and mountans of coal ash.

 

California is fairly unique with their nuclear problems. Out of the over 100 nuclear plants in the US, only 3 of them have been sited as being at fairly high risk, and out of the 3 come both of California's nuclear plants. Making the situation worse is it appears the companies running those 2 nuclear plants lack competence.

I don't think anyone thinks that solar manufacturing waste is worse than nuclear waste, nor that it is high compared to coal. There are a few things going on, and Solar waste in california for constructing the panels has been under counted. Why is that important? One of the reasons that "We" the us are supposed to subsidize California solar manufacturers are that Chinese pollute more and fairness and jobs. Maybe the levels of ghg from getting chinese solar chips is not really much higher, and we should not have a tarrif.

The recent articles -
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/08/business/energy-environment/us-affirms-tariffs-against-chinese-solar-companies.html

According to NREL solar is bigger than eia says but still tiny.
Where Did All the Solar Go? Calculating Total U.S. Solar Energy Production | Renewable Energy Project Finance

according to eia in the first 9 months of 2012, the most recent figures, wind had grown to 4.4% and solar to 0.11% of power used. If NREL is correct and this is under counted by a factor of 2.6 solar still is only 0.3% of power. That makes it hard to imagine that current policies will grow solar enough to have a big impact even in california. Reducing ghg in California might actually be helped with quite a different policy, build ccgt plants. That would prevent it from importing the 7% coal that it does, increase grid stability, lower rates, reduce grid losses importing power from other states. Solar is growing rapidly with the cheap chinese prices but its tiny.

Here is one idea of how to encourage solar in a politically savvy way
Value Of Solar Tariffs -- The Way To Go? - CleanTechnica

 

Not about PV, but continuing my OT about non-conventional oil. Price Waterhouse Coopers presents their analysis here:

Read PwC’s report on how Shale Oil will revolutionise energy marketswC

For people interested in the topic, it probably merits attention as much as the two others I mentioned above.

...Hope that URL works. as I pasted it in, it did not contain a smiley. Anyway, you could go to PwC: Audit and assurance, consulting and tax services and search for shale oil and get to the right page

 

In the grand scheme of things, a 20 year life expectancy of a PV modual is on the low is side. I would think in the real world, 30 years might be a more realistic target.

Icarus

 

Someone at PwC is being a little disingenuous with that price chart. They have a line with falling prices if OPEC stops being OPEC and starts pumping oil as if they weren't a monopoly. That is a crazy scenario, but some people seem to want to believe.

Many analysts I've seen have talked about the shale boom as a way to transition away from using so much oil. The high prices $90+/bbl allow time to buy electrified or alternative use vehicles without crahing the economy. Deuche bank predicted lowered demand and shale would limit how high oil prices can spike.

I have heard more and more about $90/bbl being the new floor. OPEC will change production to make more money, but won't try to push it bellow that price. The shale plays mean that we can stay closer to that price than $200/bbl oil. Shortages from situations like a nuclear iran can still spike prices in the short term though.

 

Yeah. For some reason articles like to quote the solar panel warranty period as opposed to it's likely lifespan. Given how panels built in the 80s perform now, it's likely that properly maintained crystalline Si PV panels will only loose ~5-10% of their original output per decade. Amorphous Si panels loose about twice that, but they also cost half as much.

I suppose these are the same people who would junk/sell a car once the warranty ran out. IIRC the 82 Toyota p/u I was given had a 30k mile/3 year mile warranty. ~270k miles/30 years later, it still runs ok. It's not at 100%, but nothing that isn't new is.